About

A twitter of inconsequent vitality.

By Ian Mason.

Journal, notebook, photoblog, linkblog.

Quotes, reminders and idle thoughts.

Hidden Ice

There are few songs for domesticity
For routine work, money-making or scholarship
Though these are apt for eulogy or tragedy.

And I would praise our adaptability
Who can spend years and years in offices and beds
Every morning twirling the napkin ring,
A twitter of inconsequent vitality.

And I would praise our inconceivable stamina
Who work to the calendar and maintain
The equilibrium of nerves and notions,
Our mild bravado in the face of time.

Those who ignore disarm. The domestic ambush
The pleated lampshade the defeatist clock
May never be consummated and we may never
Strike on the rock beneath the calm upholstering.

But some though buoyed by habit, though convoyed
By habitual faces and hands that help the food
Or help one with one’s coat, have lost their bearings
Struck hidden ice or currents no one noted.

One was found like Judas kissing flowers
And one who sat between the clock and the sun
Lies like a Saint Sebastian full of arrows
Feathered from his own hobby, his pet hours.

Louis MacNeice

Away from Micro.blog my main web presence is at nntk.net – the nntk stands for No Need To Know, an acronym which took its inspiration from the (old and not recently updated) site NTK.

nntk.net is essentially unstructured and random - just the presentation of some material I’ve been interested in, sympathetic towards and/or have collected over the years. Most importantly it consists of resources (in particular Larry Law’s Spectacular Times) that I haven’t easily managed to find elsewhere on the web so felt that it would be useful to maintain there.

I have also got several other social networking profiles. I am now trying to consolidate them a little using Micro.blog, essentially posting my own content here and then cross-posting to other sites as required. In other places I am still

@masoni on Mastodon
@thedimpause on Twitter

📸 I share a lot photographs at thedimpause.photos.

There are even more links on my OMG.LOL profile and my Find me page.

You can follow, chat to or contact me on any of these sites. I engage regularly with some more than others! Shares, comments, reposts, likes and the usual on any of the sites are always welcome.

Where did the name The Dim Pause come from?

How sweet it is to sit and read the tales
Of mightiest poets and to hear the while
Sweet music, which when the attention fails
Fill the dim pause —

The fragment of poetry quoted above is by Percy Bysshe Shelley. The lines were written in a notebook, probably in March 1819. According to Mary Shelley, Shelley heard the Miserere in the Sistine Chapel on 30th March 1819 and, as he was reading Plutarch on that day, he was possibly reading him during the performance. The lines may reflect that. I certainly seem to (too often) experience ‘the dim pause’ of loss of concentration when reading - the familiarity made this fragment of verse memorable to me.

💬 on Micro.blog